Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - It is happening again (False Alarm! part vi)

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

Little girls who can talk to ghosts! The Nazi Supernatural! The legacy of artist Iris Häussler’s first fictional character Joseph Wagenbach. Plus America’s Greatest Lie! 2018 is not the first time truth, fiction and lies have merged together. In the 1850s people turned to the the dead for answers. In the 1930’s, Hitler and the Nazis tried to remake the world using magic and pseudoscience. In phase two of False Alarm! we’re going to bounce between the second half of the 19th century, the interwar years and the present to find out if we are doomed for a repeat?

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. This installment is called It Is Happening Again. I'm enjoying your new series, but I think your framing is incorrect. Okay. You keep talking about truth versus fiction, but if you really want to understand what's going on in America right now, you need to realize the battle is between fiction and lies. What do you mean? Do you know who Parson Weems is? No. He's the guy who wrote and published the first biography about George Washington just after his death.

It's titled A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington. He presents Washington as not just a hero of the Revolutionary War and our first president, but really as a demigod and savior of the world. And what does he have to do with America and lies? This is where we get the story about George Washington and the cherry tree. Ah, but that's just fiction, right? Everyone knows that. No, no, it's a lie. It's a beautifully written masterpiece of a lie.

The evidence that the story is true is equal to the evidence that it is false. There's nothing implausible about it. Weems didn't even write that George Washington chopped down the tree. He wrote that he damaged it. So six-year-old with a hatchet damaging a tree perfectly within the realms of possibility. He's on a farm, possible too. And then later confessing the deed, the whole thing, possible. Makes sense. Also, we should note, in his writing, Weems doesn't even say he's the one telling us this story. He says he got it from a venerable old woman in the neighborhood who was kin to George and who was actually there.

So wait, he made her up? Oh yeah, totally. She's fake. But as a source, she acts like material evidence. Evidence that makes this lie more real. But explain what's different if we take this story as a lie rather than fiction. If this story about a morally pure little boy dedicated to the truth unravels as fiction, what are we left with? Some inspirational crap about how we could be as a country or how we should be. But we continue to hold on to the plausibly true idea that we are a country based on moral laws and that our leaders,

especially our president, would never lie to us. Even though it's fiction, it's still all plausible and thus true. If, on the other hand, this story unravels as a lie, well, then we get to finally ask questions about intent. We get to ask questions about why people are telling us stories that are not true, and why people are spreading them, and why people are believing them. Okay, so then why did Parson Weems tell the lie about the cherry tree? He wanted to make a quick buck. Mama! Maggie Fox screamed out one night, about three months after moving into their rented Hydesville house. John and Margaret came running into the room. Maggie, 14, and her sister Kate, 11,

were sitting bolt upright in bed, looking as though they'd seen a ghost. They'd heard something, they said. All was quiet for a moment, and then John and Margaret heard it too. Quaking in their beds, the girls asked their mother if she knew what or who was making the creepy sound. The Fox family stood there in the dark listening, and the noise repeated. Margaret said perhaps the girls should sleep in their parents' room that night, and the girls dutifully moved their blankets and pillows across the hall. Each night, the sounds grew louder.

Now even the beds and chairs seemed to tremble. One night, Mr. Fox heard a knocking on the front door of the house, but when he went to see who it was, there was no one there. Kids playing pranks, he assured his wife. But the next morning, Mrs. Fox told David, the girl's 28-year-old eldest brother, she worried the house had a ghost. Oh, mother, David replied,

when you find out the cause, it will be one of the simplest things in the world. He also asked her not to tell the neighbors, worrying the family would be mocked for being soft-headed. That night, the wrapping returned. John and Margaret searched the house. They determined that the sound was loudest in the girls' room, but it seemed to be coming from within the house's very walls.

The Foxes noted the sounds only happened when their daughters were nearby But it seemed to be coming from within the house's very walls. The Foxes noted the sounds only happened when their daughters were nearby and ended around the same time the girls fell asleep, usually around midnight. They wondered if something about the spirits required the girls' presence. Then came the night of March 31st. Mrs. Fox was so exhausted that she felt an illness coming on. She insisted they all go to bed early, right at dusk, and all in the same room for safety. All was quiet for a moment, and then the rapping began. Here it is again, Maggie cried.

They listened very carefully, and the noise grew louder and louder. Suddenly, Kate suggested they try to talk to whatever was making the noise to see if it might answer. Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do, she called out, giving two claps. There was a pause, and then two raps answered. Now do as I do, Maggie called, joining in, and she clapped four times. Four raps answered. Mrs. Fox marveled.

Could this be a ghost trying to communicate with them out here in this little house in the woods? Was their cottage really a portal to the world beyond? Now you, Maggie said to their mother, ask it a question. Shivering, Mrs. Fox called out into the dark house. How many children do I have? A pause, and then... Six. But I only have five, Mrs. Fox said, almost relieved that the ghost had made an error.

The girls reminded their mother that she'd had a baby who died in infancy. Is this a human being that answers my questions so correctly? Mrs. Fox asked. No rap. Is it a spirit? If it is, make two raps. Mr. Vox went out into the cold country evening and called for a Mrs. Redfield to come and see what was taking place in their home.

Mrs. Redfield showed up, sure it was the Fox girls playing a joke on their parents, but she was moved when she saw the sisters sitting up in bed looking pale and frightened. Upon hearing the raps, Mrs. Redfield called her husband to join them. Then Mr. Redfield went and got the dooslers. The dooslers called the hides and the jewels. Soon the house was packed with about 15 people, all baffled by the talking ghost.

Mrs. Redfield knelt beside the fox girl's bed. Is there a heaven to obtain, she asked. The spirit knocked yes. Another woman in the room said, I'm afraid. God will protect you, Mrs. Redfield told the woman. The wraps are a gift from God, aren't they, she gently asked the spirit, and the spirit said yes. Oh mother, Kate had said at one point that first night, as their house filled with neighbors, I know what it is. Tomorrow is April Fool's Day, and it's somebody trying to fool us.

But as the days rolled on, the spirit didn't leave. Nor did the town want it to. The Fox family was besieged. Simple farmers came straight from the field, dirt under their fingernails. Shopkeepers in their best work clothes came from their places of business. Visitors asked the spirit about dead relatives, about the afterlife, about their crops, and their lives and their children's futures. They walked away consoled that death was not the end, that those who they had lost were still around them and were at peace. By the end of the weekend, 300 people surrounded the house, eager to hear messages from the great beyond. We have all this detail and dialogue thanks to the fact that a local lawyer named E.E. Lewis

went around town in 1848 gathering up testimonies from the Foxes and their neighbors and published them that same year as A Report of the Mysterious Noises Heard in the House of Mr. John D. Fox in Hydesville, Arcadia, Wayne County. Hydesville is a typical little hamlet of New York State. Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would later write of the Foxes' hometown in his 1926 book, The History of Spiritualism, with a primitive population.

It consists of a cluster of wooden houses of a very humble type. It was in one of these that there began this development, which is already, in the opinion of many, by far the most important thing that America has given to the commonweal of the world. Doyle was talking about none other than those two little girls. That's writer Ada Calhoun reading from her essay, The Sisters Who Spoke to Spirits. spirits. As Arthur Conan Doyle notes, spiritualism can be traced all the way back to these two little girls and their rapping ghost. Spiritualism is the religious movement that took the world by storm during the second half of the 19th century. At its peak, it had over 8 million followers,

mostly middle and upper class people from the United States and Europe. Spiritualists believe the dead can talk, and we can hear them. And they believe if we listen closely, the dead will tell us the truth, not just about our world, but the one beyond as well. There's been this efflorescence of fiction on the Nazi occult or Nazi werewolves. There are already Nazi vampires in Captain America and Batman during World War II in the comic books. The problem has been that that popular image became so widespread by the 80s and 90s with Indiana Jones that mainstream scholars became allergic to it. There is a reason we have so many fictions, movies, comic books, thrillers, about the Nazis and the occult.

As Eric Kurlander, the author of the book Hitler's Monsters, discovered early in his research, almost the entire Nazi leadership were true believers. Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Hess, Hans Frank, Walter Daré, so many Nazi leaders, they actually believe in this stuff. You know, they don't embrace every aspect of astrology, biodynamic agriculture, clairvoyance, dowsing, but many of them they find compelling. Hitler clearly has been immersed in paganism and Norse mythology and finds it to be kind of a wonderful way, both metaphorically and potentially historically, to view the world. He has a dowser check the Reich Chancellery for cancer-causing death rays. Not an engineer, but a dowser, right? And I think Hitler was pragmatic about what of these ideas he should use or exploit and which ones were bunk.

And in the end, I found that maybe Reinhard Heydrich of the leaders is the only one who has seemingly no authentic belief in any of these ideas. But other than Heydrich, there aren't that many Nazis who reject occultism, border science, and or paganism completely. Hitler's Monsters certainly isn't the first scholarly work to delve into the strange world of Nazi occultism. What's different about this one, though, is that it provides us with a grand unified Nazi theory of the weird or supernatural. I don't think it would be possible to give an accurate view of how pervasive these ideas were if I just kept it to occultism. The occult's too narrow.

It's unhelpful in the sense that it really connotes something secret, esoteric, that is not shared with many people, when in fact what I see happening in Germany and Austria is a widespread popularity, a public embrace of these ideas. And that would then exclude border science and pagan religion, which I see of a piece. But we still need to recognize where those lines are. So the only way to do that was to have a broader lens and then show that there are different traditions that interweave. I say, you know what, they're all participating in a similar epistemology, which I would call supernatural. Something that's not driven by an acceptance of natural science,

empiricism, secularism, the scientific method, but something that seeks to transcend that. Many of them do the same practices. Some might be called border science, some might be called a cult. And then many of them are paganists or Nordicists who believe in Thor and Odin at the same time. All of these things are floating around together in the supernatural imaginary. Plugged into the supernatural imaginary, the Nazis were able to take a number of complementary and in some cases competing ideas and bring them together

in the service of Aryan superiority, ethnic cleansing, and total war. The idea of a supernatural imaginary is a derivation of the social imaginary, a concept the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor used to move beyond what he saw were the limitations of social theory. He wanted to explain how people actually make sense of their external reality. The social imaginary is what happens in modern industrial states after the Enlightenment when religion no longer defines the kind of lens through which you look at the world. It's no longer faith-based, it's secular, it's rational, but since you still need a

kind of faith in the system, you have an imaginary that the Constitution, the flag, patriotism, he calls this a social imaginary. And I thought, you know what, if I replace social with supernatural, that's exactly what it is that I'm finding. This kind of a whole set of themes, beliefs, concepts that define how people view the world, how they imagine their existence. We're going to spend some time with Eric Kurlander over the next few episodes. He's going to tell us how the Nazis deployed the supernatural imaginary to merge fiction, truth, and lies and reshape reality. Most of my fictitious characters I draft, I invent. I slip into their shoes. It could be different gender, different race,

different generation, whatever. And I do their obsessive work, and then I basically slip out again and become the curator. But Joseph Fagenbach, I couldn't slip out. Iris Hausler is a German artist who lives and works in Toronto. We first heard about her a few episodes back from Karen Patterson, the curator who put one of Iris' fictional artists, Florence Hazard, into a gallery at the Kohler Art Center in Wisconsin.

Recently, I was in Toronto, and so I met up with Iris to learn more about one of her first fictional characters, the one that made her famous, Joseph Wagenbach. He was born in 1929, so he's my parents' generation. And because I grew up in a generation of absurd silence regarding the past, absurd, I learned in school about the Holocaust, not from my parents. I wanted to just give this generation a voice. So I created this boy who basically was raised just eight kilometers away from Bergen-Belsen, that was a concentration camp. He would have witnessed atrocities and he would have not interfered. So I made him feel guilty and not be able to escape that. He tries to escape.

In 1962, the year Iris is born, Joseph Wagenbach emigrates to Canada and settles in Toronto, where Iris lives now. And from there on he lives this reclusive life. And what he does in this life is basically creating an alternative world. In 2006, Joseph's alternative world merged with ours. Iris Hausler installed Joseph and the objects that she'd been making for him in a little house downtown at 105 Robinson Street. She knew right away that she'd chosen the right location because she discovered another unknown outsider artist making sculptures on the same block. There was directly across the street actually a house that I would label as an art prue, as outside art,

where a gentleman had lived who created all these windmills and stuff on the roof. And I adored that I found, wow, this is perfect, you know. Unfortunately, we don't know anything about the man who made these windmills or his work because Toronto has no official agency dedicated to preserving the work of unknown artists. Joseph Wagenbach had better luck. When he had a stroke, the municipal archive stepped in. The story was that he's now in a nursing home, and the house will be put on the market

to finance his nursing home stay for the rest of his life. And when the house was opened and show to real estate, they said, oh my gosh, we can never show that to the public. They ordered bins and started throwing out his, what I would call, artwork. Then a guy from the Municipal Archive Toronto passed by who lives in a neighborhood, looks in this container and says, what's going on here? And starts intervening. The municipal archive doesn't exist. So I created that to say, basically, wouldn't it be amazing we would have something like this?

Because normally a reclusive artist who has no record, no credits, his or her work will just end up at Salvation Army or Value Village, in a good case, otherwise in a dump. In the summer of 2006, the Municipal Archives opened up Joseph Wagenbach's house to the public. I designed a sign that looks a little bit like City Toronto sign, says Municipal Archive, and we put it in the front lawn and we said, visitors, report to the field office. The field office was a plywood case with a white tarp over, with a coffee machine, a fire extinguisher and a computer. If it was a small group,

they got a lab coat if they wanted and they got gloves and then they were allowed to touch anything there. Nothing was clued onto the tables, nothing was secured. Coming into the entry, there would be hanging an old coat and there would be a hat of a man and some man's shoes. And then you turn around and you see, the whole room is completely full with pillars that merge into sculptures, with sculptures come out of the wall that sometimes have human faces. As word spread, Iris had to train and hire additional staff for the public tours.

And for the people who lived in the neighborhood, Josef Wagenbach became more real. They brought stuffed animals and CDs with music they think that would be nice for Josef. For the staff of the municipal archive to please pass on to him personally. It's like, wow. So they developed a relationship to a fictitious person that was apparently so close-fetched

that they identified it with their neighborhood. I mean, not only did they contribute stories, I think they made up stories. Even Iris would sometimes forget what was real and what was not. Like the morning she woke up after falling asleep on Wagenbach's couch. When I wake up in the morning and rub my eyes and I see a cigarette butt on the floor and then I'm like, ah, Joseph! And I feel, I have this deep feeling that I'm invading Joseph Wagenbach, his space, and that he will somehow protest or whatever. And my body starts shaking.

I tremble. I run out of the house. I had fallen to my own trap, so to speak, or into my own story, what is beautiful, right? I believed into this character. Because the material evidence, the smell and everything is so real that he can come in any moment through the door and I wouldn't be surprised. Iris Hausler and her partner, curator Ronda Corvesi, had sent an email to all the local media explaining what they were doing

and requesting a few weeks of no coverage so that audiences would be able to experience the local media, explaining what they were doing and requesting a few weeks of no coverage so that audiences would be able to experience the site without knowing the whole story. But the National Post seized the opportunity to stoke faux outrage with a front page headline denouncing Iris Hausler as a hoax. And now this is a very particular framing of you and your work. You are now being set up as an artist who's just out to trick people. And I'm curious how you felt about it at that moment. character, that this labeling just takes the attention away from the content. It's all of a sudden the framing that makes people's perception changing, shifting. Yeah, it's sad. Benjamin, the interesting thing with the story is that the media did not succeed because the emotions that were triggered by the people going through this immersive house were so of reality. Like people were allowed to open drawers, to take pictures in their hand, to turn things around. They could smell the wax, the dust. They could sit on the sofa he had slept on.

They were encased in this very small space. It was palpable. It was haptic. You could smell it. You could sense it. That actually people didn't want to give up on this experience. So the emotional involvement and impact of the people was stronger than somebody who wants to deteriorate them away from it. The official name of this project is the legacy of Josef Wagenbach. To me, there is also a legacy at the core of Iris Haussler's artistic practice.

Thanks to Josef Wagenbach, she doesn't have to move to other countries or hide her identity in order to do what she does. Joseph taught her that people truly want to believe. I just had to tell myself, you know, instead of giving this hoax constantly the title over my work, I can also just trust the work. We as a human being, we want to be taken on to a story. We want to immerse. We long for these characters who are underdogs and somehow build something meaningful. I learned that people are actually willing to consciously suspend their disbelief.

If the material evidence is very strong, that you self-believe yourself so deeply into that you know you're not telling a lie, you can do it as many times as you want. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called It Is Happening Again. This episode was produced by me, Benjamin Walker, and Andrew Calloway. It featured Iris Hausler, TOE special correspondent Chris, and Ada Calhoun, and Eric Kurlander. Those two are going to be with us for the duration of this next arc of our series, False Alarm. On the homepage, I've put a link to both Ada Calhoun's essay on

the Fox sisters and Eric Kudelander's new book, Hitler's Monsters. Also, we've been having a tremendous response to the TOE Benjamin coin. Order yours now before they're all gone. I'm going to be traveling to London next week and then to Vancouver, Canada. So if you want to get yours in person, get in touch. Totally a possibility. Find out more at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, home to some of the world's best podcasts like The Illusionist and The Truth. You can listen to all the Radiotopia shows

at radiotopia.fm.